


Undoing

by Lafayette1777



Category: Blade Runner (Movies), Blade Runner 2049
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Found Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Siblings, i finally saw this movie and i have some Feelings, i just want k to have a goddamn happy ending okay, very brief - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-24
Updated: 2018-01-24
Packaged: 2019-03-09 01:20:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13470693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lafayette1777/pseuds/Lafayette1777
Summary: Officer K is unwinding himself into someone new.





	Undoing

He’s thinking of Joi. Of Luv. Of joy and love. Of the unending sky above him. It seems that he’s looked, before, but never quite seen it. The lofty, eternal distance. The immeasurable softness of it. 

Things are starting to blur. 

A voice, somewhere, is asking, _is he going to be okay?_ Another is replying, _there should be an emergency triage kit under the driver’s seat—_

There is rustling. The sound of feet on snow. Hands snagging under his armpits to drag his leaden bulk. He can hear it all in bright, crisp detail, even if his vision is beginning to gray out. To turn the color of the sky. 

With a distant, mild concern, he thinks, _I’m going to die._

And so he does. 

 

 

(For a little while, at least).

 

 

When he awakes, he can still see it. A white fountain, gleaming in the dark. Or maybe it was a mountain, blanketed with snow. Only the vague imprint of it remains, like the ghost of a bright sun behind closed eyes. The dream is already slipping away.

Someone is cleaning away the sticky, dried blood on the side of his head with a rough cloth. That someone is Deckard, who looks away when K turns his head to face him. 

“It’s about time,” Deckard mutters. The KD6 line sold to the LAPD is known for its ability to read microexpressions, to catch the inflections that give away untruths. Necessary, for investigations. For extracting answers, and then eyeballs. It doesn’t take much to deduce that Deckard’s gruffness is more than a little forced. 

“Someone did you a favor.” Dr. Stelline’s face comes into a view, a plain paper mask over her nose and mouth. He can see the mildly sheepish smile in the crinkle of her eyes. It’s possible that he might be gaping, a little, as he gasps for breath. A dozen different spots across his body have begun to throb. “You come with a tracker installed on your left kidney, generally considered impossible for amateur extraction without fatal blood loss. Whoever stabbed you did so with incredible surgical precision.”

He thinks of Luv. The coldness in her eyes; the desperation beneath it. 

This combination of his last image of her and the information about the tracker is a little too much to process. Without a solid baseline, at least. He opens his mouth, waits for words to croak from this throat, and wonders what they’ll be. “You’re out of your lab,” he rasps, turning his eyes back to Ana. 

“Yes,” she says, and again that vaguely nervous smile spreads across her face. “I didn’t tell you the whole truth, the first time we met. It was necessary lie, in order for me to hide in plain sight for so long. And I needed a reason to stay on this planet.” She shrugs a little, her expression loosening. “My condition is milder than I let on.”

“Yours, on the other hand…” Deckard still isn’t looking at him. Beside him is a pile of spent plastic packages—a collection of glue and healing enzymes and sterile bandages. Distantly, he can hear the insistent patter of rain on an unfamiliar tin roof. They are far from where he was last conscious, he imagines. In time and in miles, and in every other unit of change he can imagine.

“Officer K—” begins Dr. Stelline. 

“Joe,” says Deckard. 

“No, K is fine.” The effort to form words is enormous; he feels his eyes unfocus. A moment later he realizes it’s because he’s shaking. 

“Kay,” says Ana, softly. The letter stretches in her mouth, becomes something new and clean. Something gentler. It elongates in his own mind, too. 

Deckard finishes chipping away at the blood on the side of his head, disappearing with the red tinted rag from Kay’s line of vision. He notices, eventually, that his head is being supported by Ana’s folded thighs, and after a little while she switches them out for what feels like a proper pillow. 

She looks at him for a few long moments. At a loss for what else to do, he looks back. 

“Get some rest, Kay,” she murmurs, bringing up a blanket and tucking it in around his shoulders. She leans in a little closer, as though sharing a secret, the smile in her eyes drifting toward watery. “I’m glad you came back to us.”

“Me too,” he murmurs, maybe. He’s falling asleep. It feels almost like a choice. 

 

 

When he resurfaces again, it’s only Deckard in the room with him. The ceiling above them has changed; either they’ve moved him to another bed or changed venues entirely. It’s unclear if Deckard is aware that he’s awake—the older man is seated on the other side of the room, whittling away at something with a four-inch pocket knife. 

Kay has to work not to panic. Has to work to quench the swell of pain each breath stirs up like silt at the bottom of a lake. He’s never been so far off his baseline. Never been so far from what he is. _Is this how the humans always feel?_ he wonders idly, then digs his nails into his palm until it bleeds. 

He’s still tucked in, warm and clean. Gentle. He’s still Kay. 

“Kid, I really don’t know what to make of you,” Deckard grunts out, without looking up from his knife. “Of any of this.”

The wound in his side throbs. Luv’s parting gift. “I know the feeling.”

The silence stretches. He works on regulating his breathing, his racing animal of a handmade heart. 

“But you’re with us now,” Deckard continues. The dry scrape of his knife across some unknown material fills the gaps between words. “And Ana—we’re all together. Alright? If you want.”

Kay swallows painfully, his eyes beginning to burn. “Alright.”

The sound of the knife abates. “Only if you want.”

“I said alright.”

Footsteps echo across the floor. Deckard appears above him, places a hesitant hand on his shoulder. Kay’s shaking, again; Deckard must think he’s cold because he tucks another blanket around him. Kay lets out a long, uneven breath.

He thinks he’s going to cry. It’s possible he already is. 

“You’re gonna be okay, kid,” Deckard mutters, finally meeting his eyes. 

_Okay_ used to mean baseline. 

“Are you warm enough?” Deckard asks, warm hand slipping through Kay’s hair when he nods stiffly in reply. Deckard turns, and then his steps recede, and eventually the rhythmic pull of the knife resumes. It’s wood, Kay thinks. That’s the sound of wood, coming apart. Reshaping into something new.

He shifts to face the wall, curling in on himself, and cries his way down into something resembling sleep.

 

 

Eventually, he’s well enough to sit up. To rise fully without feeling something tumultuous and sick rise inside of him. He can stand at the sink and soak the blood out of his coat until he begins to sweat from the pain and Ana begs him to sit. That shake in his hands, though, doesn’t quite fade. Even though he keeps one in his shoulder holster at all times, he can’t even imagine holding a gun right now. 

He can’t really imagine any of this.

“Where are we?” Kay asks, eventually, when he thinks he’s ready for the answer. The apartment is only two rooms, the floor blanketed with synthetic rice straw roped into mats, the windows permanently frosted. 

“Santa Monica,” says Deckard, impassive. He watches Kay’s expression, even though it gives away nothing. “That okay?”

He nods, because it’s the only thing he’s ever done. 

In the evenings they sit around a low table and eat dehydrated foodstuffs that Deckard scrounges for during the day. Ana and Deckard talk non stop, filling in the gaps from many years spent apart. Deckard’s laugh is a throaty, awed thing. Ana throws her head back, nose scrunching. Kay would find it all rather charming if didn’t leave him a little baffled at the same time. Inside his coat, Joi’s broken emanator still sits in his breast pocket, the weight of it both a comfort and ache. It’s real, though—he can question her but he can’t question the realness of the raw nerve she’s left behind sputtering in his chest. 

He thinks of Joshi, too, sometimes. How sometimes she used to look at him like she expected something, but never quite managed to ask for it. 

“When you’re ready, we probably need to get a move on,” Deckard tells him one morning. 

“When I’m ready,” Kay says flatly, a question in his eyes. 

“When you’re healed,” Deckard replies. 

“Where are we going?”

Ana trots into the room, tossing her tablet onto the dresser next to the door. “Freysa has safehouses all up the west coast. We’ll bounce between those until the time is right.”

Kay looks to Deckard, but the older man is patting himself down for his carving knife, eyes turned away. “For what?”

Ana crosses her arms. There’s no fear in her eyes. “Until the revolution begins in earnest.”

Kay feels both his eyebrows raise of their own volition. So much has happened since Freysa explained their mission to him in that humid warehouse, his mind still half consumed by pain and grief. To hear Ana talk about it here, in this modest room, is edging toward absurd. 

“It’s gonna be a new world, Kay,” Deckard says. Kay can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic. It’s possible that Deckard’s spent so long by himself that he’s lost his ability to sound anything but cynical. He’s started carving again, bent over in his usual chair, the emergent shape of the wood obscured by his grip on it.

Kay doesn’t reply, his lips pressing into a firm line. 

“Don’t look so worried, Kay,” Ana says, tilting her head. “We were born for this.”

He has definitively no idea what she means by _we_.

 

 

They depart on a Friday afternoon, a crispy layer of gray snow still sticking to the sidewalk after a dusting from the night before. His insides still feel pinched and bruised with each step, but he can compartmentalize it, now. Even without the baseline. He’s not sure where that leaves him on the scale of real to unreal. 

Ana leads him by the elbow down the stairs, holding him like he’s something delicate even though he’s certain she knows about his reinforced skeleton and the military-grade microfibers in his skin. They’re both getting used to extraneous touch—her because of her years isolated, and him because it’s only ever been used against him. 

(Joshi had found him, once. In an unused basement office, his shirt torn. Bruises exposed, eyes still glazed. She’d helped him avoid the baseline—they’d both known he didn’t have a chance in hell of passing it.)

(She was never quite gentle, but she tried to be.)

(That had counted for something.)

Deckard finishes loading the spinner just as they reach the sidewalk. Ana adjusts her mask, then the gloves over her hands. The plan is to head further north—to get all the way out of Greater LA and hope for the best. There’s some ambiguity, in Kay at least, regarding what _the best_ actually means for the foreseeable future.

“Are we all ready?” Ana asks. Something gleams in her eyes, he thinks. She must appreciate the adventure of all this, the incremental step closer to a future in which she leads a fantastical revolution. He’s still not quite sure what he makes of such a possibility. He’s not sure how much of a possibility it really is. He may not have the imagination to conceive of a new order, or maybe it’s just always been safer to pretend he doesn’t.

“We’re set,” says Deckard, standing stiffly. The sidewalk isn’t good for any of them. They’re more exposed than they’ve collectively ever been. 

K lowers himself carefully into the backseat, feeling for both his gun and the broken emanator with the same careful hand. Deckard climbs behind the wheel and Ana into the passenger seat. Kay closes his eyes, takes a long breath through his nose. 

“I’m going to miss the sea,” says Ana, even though she’s never seen it.

 

 

They bounce between cities and towns and barren expanses of gray desert, occasionally broken by copses of dead trees still standing. It’s clear that this is a path Deckard has traversed before, in his years hiding out. It seems he’s stocked most of the safe houses himself. And his animal obsession extends beyond the dog in Vegas—often an animal of some sort waits for them at every doorstep, undoubtedly synthetic if they’ve managed this long on their own. 

“Back in the day,” Deckard explains. “If you had one, synthetic or not, you were rich.” He shrugs. “Now, they’re all gone, for the most part.”

“But they still feel a little luxurious, don’t they?” says Ana, holding a speckled rabbit safely against her chest. 

The animals have a tendency to follow Kay, though, as though they’re drawn to his lack of familiarity with them. Or maybe artificial attracts artificial. In Fresno a cat burrows under his sweater whenever he sits down. In Umatilla a goat sleeps curled against his side. Deckard laughs at him when he clumsily learns to scratch a raccoon behind the ears like it seems to want. 

There’s something otherworldly about the creatures, even though he knows that they have more possession of this earth than he does, by some metrics. They’re dissonant, more real than reality. Like all the other captives he’s known—Joi and Luv and Mariette among them—they seem to be waiting for something. 

He supposes he is also. 

“Freysa messaged me last night,” Ana says one afternoon, eyes on the sky. 

“And?” Kay asks. They’re trotting through a thin crust of snow toward a snow-dusted orchard. The trees ahead are all dead, of course—this farm on the outskirts of Eugene is long abandoned. But they need the firewood, and Ana looks like she needs the snowflakes in her eyelashes more than she’s ever needed anything else. 

“A rebel cell had to kill another blade runner that came looking for us.”

He can feel Ana’s eyes on him, but his only response is a non-committal hum. He doesn’t think _poor thing_ , and then immediately wonders if he should. But maybe there’s something merciful in it—for a blade runner, death is sometimes just easier. When it was just him and the snow and the steps in front of Stelline labs, he hadn’t felt anything except relief. 

He gets the feeling that this is a distinctly inhuman way of thinking. 

(Or maybe not.)

“Are they angry with me?” he finds himself asking. “For not killing Deckard? For exposing your hiding place?”

Ana fixes him with a long look. “I told them that Wallace had already figured out who I was before you had the chance to find my father. That you got to me just in time to save us.”

He stops in his tracks. “You lied for me.”

She shrugs, reaching down to gather some soggy kindling from the gray earth. “You’d do the same for me.”

In fact, he already has, in a way—his first proper lie, to the one person he thought he could never lie to. The person he never thought he’d ever want to lie to. Joshi, with her attempts at kindness. He’d told her he’d killed the child. Protected both himself and Ana for a just a little while longer without realizing it. 

“And, anyways, we share a childhood,” Ana says, straightening. 

“Like siblings,” says Kay, beginning to smile.

She smiles back. “Like twins.”

Finally, a way to quantify the notion of this thing between the three of them. For their sake, an overwhelming willingness to lie. 

It’s so easy, he thinks, to protect them. Not just because they’re inherently fragile in comparison to him. Not just because he was built to serve. It’s something else that compels him to step in front of Ana at the barest hint of trouble without a second thought. Something stranger. Deeper. 

Ana is looking up, again, at the halcyon winter scene around them. The sort of thing he used to see as samples in window holo packs back in the LA. The sort of thing Ana used to create without ever having seen it herself. 

Snow collects in the boughs of the dead trees. 

“They could almost be alive,” Ana says. “If you don’t look too closely.”

 

 

Inside, Ana slips out of her coat and lays it over where Deckard has fallen into his usual after dinner nap in a ragged armchair. Kay pats himself down, just to feel the presence of the emanator still held in the safety of his jacket. Someday, he imagines, it won’t be there waiting for him. Someday he might be glad. 

Ana adds their somewhat anemic collection of firewood to the hearth and settles in to ponder her next move at the chessboard set up on the low table. She’s been teaching Kay how to play, recently. There’s not much else to do besides play and prowl and wait, and wait, and wait. 

“Your move, Kay.”

“Just a moment.” Something in the adjoining room has caught his eye, a flash of something real among the unreal. On top of his bedroll, a wooden figure rests near his pillow, gazing at him with carved slits for eyes. He kneels beside it, takes it carefully in one hand. 

“It supposed to be a sheep,” says Deckard, awake now and standing in the doorway. “I may have been a little too ambitious, but it’s meant to be a sheep.”

“I can see it.” He runs a thumb along the spine of the creature, relishes the roughness of the material. It fits into his palm like it was made for it. 

He supposes it was. 

 

 

There’s an order to things, even in this disorder of a life on the run. It’s three bedrolls laid out on every floor of every half-furnished safehouse. A pattern undisrupted by distance or uncertainty. Deckard sleeps closest to the door, an old habit. Ana, at the insistence of her father, sleeps farthest from it. And Kay takes the middle, the negative space left between them. The bridge between war and peace. The old fight waning and the new one brewing. 

He sleeps with the somnolent whisper of breath on both sides of him, filling every corner of the room. Life encircling life in a way he’s never known. There’s a wooden sheep within easy reach of a sometimes shaky hand. And a gun under his pillow, silent and steady.

It’s the best spot in any room, he thinks. It's not a bad place to wait. 

Maybe he wasn’t born for this, but he might have been made for it.

**Author's Note:**

> lafayette1777.tumblr.com  
> (please come talk to me about this movie ughhhh)


End file.
